David Yaffe-Bellany Photo
Justus’s photo remains on display in his mom’s living room.
Ten years after a random bullet killed her 13-year-old son, Tracey Suggs takes solace in the fact that she can still hold his hand.
Suggs keeps a plaster mold of her son Justus’ left hand, taken a day before he was removed from life support in August 2006, in a small box in his old bedroom, surrounded by flowers that were on display at his funeral. Every few days, she sits in his room, clutching the plaster hand, which is stained with her sweat, and tells her dead son over and over how much she misses him.
“I sit there and place my hand on it, and I’ll talk to him like if I’m holding his hand again,” she said. “Sometimes I think, maybe it’s just a psychological thing, that a warmth comes off it.”
Justus was a happy-go-lucky kid with dreams of opening a repair shop when he was caught in the crossfire of a gang shooting two blocks from his home on Davenport Avenue in the Hill. He was killed just two weeks after a stray bullet claimed the life of another 13-year-old, Jajuana Cole, in similar circumstances in Dixwell. Their deaths provoked widespread outrage over the scourge of gun violence and the tragic plight of children growing up in a crime-ravaged community. Their moms became the faces of public grief as well as of a communal determination to make New Haven safer for other children.
A decade later, Suggs has figured out how to keep living without denying the pain that stays with her every day. In an interview in her living room, where pictures of Justus adorn the walls, Suggs told the Independent about her dreams for the future, her strategies for coping with grief, and her still burning love for the son she lost.
Standing Still, and Moving On
A tattoo of Justus that his mother got a year after he died.
Over the past ten years, Suggs has tried to move on with her life: She recently enrolled in a general-education course at Albertus Magnus College. Once she finishes her studies there, she plans to apply to a nursing program at Gateway Community College.
For Suggs, those ambitions are inextricably tied to memories of Justus. She worked as a certified nursing assistant when Justus was growing up; he was convinced that her hospital scrubs meant she was a fully qualified nurse. (She now works as a janitor at a local school.)
“If that’s what you want, I’m a nurse,” she used to tell him.
She has returned to school partly because she feels it’s what Justus would’ve wanted.
“I do it for him. I can immerse myself in it, but he still comes to mind,” she said. “I tell him, ‘Your mom’s going back to school. She’s gonna do this, gonna do that. I know you’re proud of your mom.’”
Still, Suggs said, she doubts that getting a nursing license will lessen the pain that has consumed her ever since a crowd of boys banged on her door ten years ago to say that Justus had been shot in the street.
“They say time heals all wounds — that’s not true,” she said. “Time just makes the wound deeper and deeper until there’s nowhere else for it to go, until everything’s just devoured. It takes from your soul.”
Stopping the Violence
Suggs used to write poems and diary entries about Justus in a crinkled notebook that she keeps on a table in the living room. In one entry, dated September 7, 2006, about a month after Justus died, she testified to the power of “a mother’s love”: “Precious son and more than adored,” she wrote, “a mother’s love will keep your memory alive.”
But Suggs —whose wide smile and hearty laugh hide the profound grief that has followed her every day since the shooting — realizes that it will take more than just a mother’s love to save lives in New Haven.
In the summer of 2006, then-Mayor John DeStefano promised to make ending gun violence a top priority for his administration. Mayor Toni Harp has continued that crusade. Crime has dropped steadily over the past five years, but gun violence remains a serious problem in the city. Of the twelve people who died of gun wounds last year, three were teenagers.
In 2009, Suggs joined forces with Sondra Foreman-Ulmer, Jajuana Cole’s mother, as part of the gun violence-awareness initiative CTribat . That program has since wrapped up. But the devastating consequences of gang warfare have continued to haunt Suggs’ family. Three years ago, her nephew was shot and killed. And last year, one of Justus’ old friends, Francesca Ratchford, was shot on her front porch.
Suggs is no longer involved in any public campaigns against gun violence. But she feels an obligation to intervene when she hears neighborhood boys joking about bullets — an urge to remind them that her son died “because of nonsense.”
“I don’t condone violence,” she tells them, “but I’d rather see you fight fist to fist than talk about guns.”
Anniversaries
A shrine to Justus in his old bedroom.
In June, Foreman-Ulmer held a family party to commemorate the tenth anniversary of Jajuana’s death. A crowd of dozens of relatives gathered at the Greek Olive restaurant to sing and dance and eat cake.
Suggs visited her son’s grave on the tenth anniversary of his shooting, just as she has every year since he died. She never considered holding a similar event to the one Jajuana’s family organized.
“I don’t want to celebrate,” she said. “That day is not a celebration of his life, it’s the taking of his life.”
At the party for Jajuana, Foreman-Ulmer and her extended family shared stories about a girl who clearly still occupies an important place in their collective memory. Suggs, on the other hand, feels increasingly alone in her devotion to Justus.
“Even though people remember him, they don’t really remember him,” she said. “It’s like, OK, he’s a thing of the past, and now he’s gone, he’s buried, and it’s time to move on to something else.”
When she reflects on the shooting, Suggs still has to exercise tremendous willpower just to hold herself together. She usually spends only five or ten minutes at Justus’ grave. If she stayed any longer, she would lose control, she said.
“I start to think that if I let myself go, let everything out, will my mind still be there? Will I be able to recover from that breakdown? Or will I be just another mental statistic, another mental-illness person?”
Sometimes Suggs wonders what her son would have done with his life if he’d survived: if he’d have a wife, a family, a thriving repair business.
But even after all these years, she said, her dominant emotion is not sadness or nostalgia. It is anger.
Her son’s shooter, a 17-year-old named Thaddeus Rout, was sentenced to 29 years in prison. Asked if she could ever forgive him, Suggs replied not. Certain crimes, she said, are beyond redemption.
“There are just some things, like taking my son, that I just can’t forgive,” she said. “I want my son. I can’t have my son. So I can’t give forgiveness.”
We always hear about the mothers of those killed.
Where are the mothers of the killers? Do they join the marches to end violence?
Why are so many of New Haven's youngsters members of gangs?
No, it's not due to, or even mainly because of poverty.
There are poor black people all over America; comparatively few of them have children in gangs.
If people were coming in from other areas into NH and killing African American youngsters, the outcry would have been deafening, as it should be.
Where is the deafening and persistent outcry to stop the gang, drug and criminal violence within our black communities?
Nationally 91 percent of black people killed are killed by other blacks. In NH it's 99.5 percent!
After all the mayhem from 2011 to 2013, why are there still so many young black men joining gangs and killing each other?
Why are so many young black men (who live in homes with their mothers) involved in crimes?
Tracey Suggs' life has a permanent open space. Justus would have been 23 now.
Where is the mother of Thaddeus Rout? How has she been affected? Her son got 29 years in prison, but she can go and visit him monthly. She can talk to him by phone; she can ask him questions. A helpful question would be: Is there anything I could have done differently to help you?
What could have happened in your life that would have prevented you from a life of crime?
Most likely, unless he is a real 'bad ass' in prison, he will be released long before his 29 years are up. He will be in his 40's and can have a life.
Justus, Jajuana, Francesca, and the 12 young blacks killed in 2009, 23 killed in 2010, 34 killed in 2011(30 were black); 17 in 2012, 19 in 2013 and 12 in 2014.
Although not everyone killed in these years listed were black, even in the best year at least 95 percent were black. They were all killed by other blacks. What are mothers of the killers doing?
What help do they need to make life better for themselves and their children so they do not become killers